Category Archives: Art News

How to paint your own Vermeer

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Tim's Vermeer posterWhat if you could paint your own Vermeer?  Teller (as in the famous magicians Penn and Teller) has directed a new documentary called Tim’s Vermeer.  It was shown at the recent Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals and is receiving great reviews.  It follows the investigation of an inventor, Tim Jenison, into the painting methods of Jan Vermeer.  Jenison is best known to those in Digital Media as the founder of NewTek and the mastermind behind the revolutionary Video Toaster (along with Dana Carvey’s brother Brad) back in the 1980s.

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Degenerate and Stolen Art lost in WWII, finally found

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Degenerate Art exhibition, 1937

Adolf Hitler and Adolf Ziegler visit the Degenerate Art exhibition, 1937.

A search of a Munich home, owned by the son of Adolf Hitler’s favorite art dealer, has turned up 1,500 works of art stolen by the Nazis, believed to be worth over $1 billion. These works include paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Klee, and Chagall.  Most of the art is by artists whose work was displayed at the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition created at the direction of Hitler.  It is being called “the largest single find of looted art in post war history.”

Blue Dress by Matisse

‘Blue Dress in a Yellow Arm Chair,’ by Henri Matisse, circa 1936 (illustrative image: AP/Oystein Thorvaldsen, Henie-Onstad Art Center)

More information can be found online at the BBC.

First artists — mostly women?

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These hand stencils found in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain, were probably made by a man (left) and a woman (right), respectively. Photographs by Roberto Ontanon Peredo, courtesy Dean Snow

These hand stencils found in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain, were probably made by a man (left) and a woman (right), respectively.
Photographs by Roberto Ontanon Peredo, courtesy Dean Snow

An article in National Geographic presents research by an archeologist at Penn State that proposes that most of the pre-historic art found in caves was done by women.  This is based on analysis of the hand stencil “signatures.”

Will La Sagrada Familia finally be finished in 2026?

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La Sagrada Familia in 2013

La Sagrada Familia in 2013

Sagrada Familia 2026

3D visualization of the finished Cathedral

A 3D animation which shows what Antoni Gaudi’s iconic Sagrada Familia in Barcelona will look like when completed has just been released.  Begun more than 130 years ago in 1882, the push is on to finally  finish the cathedral by the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death.